Technology can be a wonderful thing. This weekend, live streaming allowed me to attend an educational event in California while sitting in my Tennessee home-office. The Institute for Functional Medicine organized its first live streaming event for a Cardio-metabolic model in its certification program. Watching 20 hours of lectures about improving heart health and being able to get up whenever I want to stretch my legs, grab a snack, or go for a jog during a break.
Even better than learning from home is the joy of learning about the majestic complexity of our bodies. God created an intricately interconnecting web of body systems which makes our heads spin. We are still just scratching the surface of God’s design. We are not livers, white cells, brain cells, blood vessels, hearts, lungs, and chemicals. We are whole beings in which physically our immune system uses our cholesterol to fight bacterial chemicals, our cardiac system is affected by our immune system’s response to inflammation, our brains are both affected by our cardiac systems and controls our cardiac systems, and it goes on.
On a different note:
Why a Functional Medicine conference? Functional Medicine works to understand the mechanisms of disease rather than just finding a diagnosis and starting treatment. By understanding the mechanism of body dysfunction and understanding how God designed the systems, Functional Medicine allows me to apply nutrition and lifestyle intensively to a patient’s care. Rather than just writing prescriptions for drugs, I can find nutritional deficiencies which reverse the bad process rather than just cover up the downstream effects.
The Institute of Functional Medicine is not Christian by any means as far as I can tell but they are trying to go beyond conventional medicine’s approach to disease and understand the body’s functioning in a deeper way. For a Christian looking to understand the complexity of God’s design, this beautiful design shines through the lectures even if the speakers don’t recognize it.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
